"The Hallowed Realm of the Self-Possessed": Christian Conversions of Slavery and Freedom

In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman famously argues that emancipation, rather than marking an absolute break between slavery and freedom, inaugurates an ambivalent condition defined by the convergence of abstract equality with new forms of racialized exploitation. This paper investigates the role of religion in this process, focusing on how Christian conceptions of personhood facilitated the formal transformation of emancipated Black subjects from chattel into individuals. In doing so, it engages a burgeoning literature which tracks the legacies, vestiges, or afterlives of racial slavery in modern concepts and practices of religion. Reading Hartman alongside Southern slave law and Christian proslavery literature, I argue that the subsumption of Black labor following emancipation operationalized an already existing isomorphism between “chattel” and “labor” established by the translatability of each into a shared Christian theological idiom. The paper concludes by considering the ramifications of this analysis for wider discussions of religion, race, and capitalism.